Google Plans to Speed up the Internet for Mobile

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project is all set to release in 2016. This is great news for content marketing companies.

The project is Google’s version of Facebook’s instant articles and Apple’s Apple News. Thousands of publishers have shown interest in the optimization, including R7.com, NZN Group, Vox Media, La Stampa, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, Mashable, BBC, The Economist, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Gannett, Hearst, The Telegraph, CBS Interactive, Thrillist, International Business Times/Newsweek, Al Jazeera America, News Corp., The New York Times, Washington Post and AOL. Advertising partners Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense have announced plans to work with the project. Google has also partnered with comScore, Adobe Analytics, ClickTale, Parse.ly and Chartbeat for analytics.

"The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of 70+ media companies collectively representing 1,600 local newspapers and television stations, has also voiced their support", Google said.

Announced in October, the AMP project makes a good attempt at optimizing pages for mobile devices. The essential concept to understand is that many content publishing sites use extraneous code, advertisements and tracking code which slows down many pages and does not allow fast loading on mobile devices.

This causes many mobile users a lot of money due to data consumption, and most visitors simply abandon the web site altogether. This is a loss for the publisher, since users should be reading articles, clicking on ads and interacting with other content. The problem is so evident that Apple has recently allowed blocking of ads, fonts, tracking code and more in iOS 9 using safari extensions.

AMP uses an open framework called AMP HTML based on existing web technologies which allow pages to be as light as possible. It eliminates rich media like graphics, animation, video, Twitter and Youtube embedded elements.

Using AMP, when searching for a topic on Google, news stories will appear in a carousel at the top of search results. Google will release this in 2016.